Chicago Police Officer John Bartholomew walked into a hospital doing his job in April and never walked out. The man accused of killing him, Alphanso Talley, was a seven-time felon riding an ankle monitor a Cook County judge had strapped on him twice under Illinois's SAFE-T Act, the state's cashless-bail law, the second time months before the shooting and over a prosecutor's written objection that no set of conditions would keep him from hurting someone. Talley had seven prior felony convictions, four of them robberies, and was already on pretrial release for battering a correctional officer when the judge freed him again. The judge did it anyway. Bartholomew is dead, the judge is still on the bench, and last week he reportedly found time to hold two courtroom deputies in contempt for being slow to remove handcuffs from a different murder suspect. You can't make this stuff up. I stopped trying years ago.
I've spent a career as a fiduciary in the financial world and the last 11 years testifying as an expert witness on what it means to owe someone a duty of care. Under FINRA Rule 2111, the industry's suitability standard, if I put a client into a concentrated position I know is loaded with risk, and it blows up, I don't get to shrug and say hindsight is 20/20. I get sued, and if I ignored red flags a reasonable professional would have caught, I lose. That is the whole architecture of fiduciary law: knowledge of risk plus a bad outcome equals accountability. A judge who releases a known violent recidivist and watches him kill someone operates, in practice, under a lower duty of care than the guy managing your 401(k). That ought to bother you.
Brooklyn Criminal Court Judge Janice Robinson released a man on no bail last month after he allegedly shot another man and wounded a service dog. Weeks later, she cut loose a teenager on bail who was then charged in the West Indian Day Parade shooting. A New York Post review of 13 of Robinson's recent cases found eight defendants walked free with no bail at all, two of them charged with attempted murder. She is not an outlier. Queens Judge Wanda Licitra released 29 of 34 accused violent felons who came before her in one six-month stretch in 2024, an 85 percent release rate, according to a Fox News analysis of court data. One of the men she freed without bail had cursed her out in open court on his way to the exit. Lady Justice is peeking out from under that blindfold, and she does not like what she sees.
This isn't confined to blue cities with bail-reform bumper stickers. Massachusetts' Supreme Judicial Court just publicly reprimanded Judge Shelley Joseph on September 10 for ordering the courtroom recorder switched off during a sidebar about an ICE detainer, then floating the idea of holding a defendant overnight so federal agents couldn't reach him. The court stopped short of finding she orchestrated the man's back-door exit from the courthouse; the court officer who actually walked him out took that fall alone, and even his federal case ended in a deferred prosecution instead of a conviction. Note the penalty for a sitting judge, hiding her own courtroom conduct from the public record: a stern letter. If I told a regulator I switched off my compliance recording during a client call because I didn't like where it was heading, I would be explaining myself to FINRA enforcement, not accepting a scolding and going back to my desk.
To be fair, judges aren't psychics. Federal pretrial data show 86 percent of released defendants finish the process with no new violation and no missed court date, and no system run by fallible people will ever hit zero. A judge who makes a defensible call on a genuinely close record and gets unlucky should not be treated the same as one who ignores a documented rap sheet and a prosecutor's written warning. Confusing the two is exactly what sinks Sen. Tim Sheehy's (R-MT) JAIL Act, which would strip judges of immunity entirely and let victims sue over any bail decision at all. It reads well in a press release, but the Supreme Court has shielded judicial decision-making from personal damages suits since Stump v. Sparkman in 1978, for good reason: no judge would release anyone if a wrong guess could bankrupt them personally. Even legal scholars sympathetic to victims call the bill dead on arrival, and they are right.
The fix isn't torching judicial independence. It's building a floor under it. Judges should have to put their reasoning in writing, on the record, before releasing anyone with a documented history of violence, so the public can see whether the facts were weighed or the case was simply waved through. Prosecutors need a fast, meaningful path to appeal when a judge departs from a statutory detention presumption, before the next crime happens, not after. Voters and legislatures deserve judge-level release and rearrest data published as routine; not dug up case by case the way the Post and Fox News had to do it. And immunity itself should narrow, not disappear: carve out a genuine exception for judges who knowingly disregard a clear statutory duty or a documented, specific warning of danger, the same line that already separates an honest fiduciary mistake from a breach worth suing over.
Officer Bartholomew's widow doesn't need a law professor explaining that judicial independence matters more than her husband's life. What she needs is a system that treats a judge's decision to free a seven-time felon with the same seriousness we already apply to a stockbroker's decision to put a widow's life savings into a bet financed with borrowed money. We hold financial fiduciaries to that standard because the stakes are real money. We should hold judicial fiduciaries to it too, because the stakes are real lives, and unlike a bad trade, they don't come back with a rebalanced portfolio.
Jay Rogers is President of Alpha Strategies and a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.